Patchwork People Chapter II The Good Man Hard to Find
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Patchwork People XXVIII: Departures. free porn video
XXVIII. Departures.
It was one of those mornings that seem unable to decide what it wants to
be. Halfway to the airport, a fine rain blew up against the windshield of
the pick-up. A few miles later, the sun unexpectedly broke out from a
temporary gap in the impregnable line of gray clouds massed like
battleships laying siege on the horizon
It had finally been agreed that Phoebe would return to New Jersey and
sign in to an outpatient rehab clinic. At the same time, she would take a
course or two at the local community college. She was ultimately talking
about cooking school. How her mother would react to that was anyone's
guess. But that discussion could be put on the back burner for now.
During the last month, as far as either Marcia or Walt could tell, Phoebe
had remained free of drugs or alcohol. What they knew for certain was
that overall she seemed much happier than she had when she arrived in
Hope Crossing. She looked healthier, too. She'd even managed to gain a
couple of pounds. Marcia had, as well, a result of their pact to stop
systematically starving themselves. She tried to mask her anxiety over
the three pounds she'd gained for Phoebe's sake. Walt, of course, was
nothing but complimentary; still, Marcia had already secretly planned to
start a diet the moment Phoebe was safely in the air.
As for Claire, she'd promised Phoebe she'd let up on trying to control
and monitor every aspect of her life. Within reason, of course. She was
still her mother, after all, and seemed anxious to reassert that fact.
But she would try. That much she could promise. Well, they'd see how that
worked out! Claire had sounded sincere enough to convince Phoebe to give
her another chance.
And Marcia encouraged Phoebe to do so.
For all the animosity between them over the years, for all her faults,
Marcia never doubted for a moment that Claire loved Phoebe every bit as
much as she did. But love was a powerful emotion and it often dredged up
a lot of other unpleasant emotional muck in its wake. Marcia had always
told herself that if she were ever in Claire's position, if she ever had
the upper hand with Phoebe, she would be a lot more generous, a lot less
possessive. She was glad to see that wasn't just talk and that, having
improbably gained the advantage during the time that Phoebe was in Hope
Crossing and at odds with her mother, Marcia had, in fact, acted
according to her principles.
"Besides which," she assured Phoebe, "I'm always here if you need a break
from your mom or just a change of scenery...or, well, whatever. You
always have a home here."
It wasn't anything different than what Marcia had always said to Phoebe;
but now, given the events that had transpired over the last month and a
half, they had an authenticity that Phoebe had probably never felt
before.
A sign flashed by the window announcing that they were leaving Hope
Crossing and Marcia already felt a gripping sensation of loss. She
suddenly remembered a conversation she'd had with Phoebe a few days
earlier. They were sitting at the kitchen counter where Marcia was mixing
batter for another pannekuchen. It was what she'd made on that disastrous
first morning after Phoebe's arrival. That day seemed a hundred years ago
now. So much had changed.
Up to that point, Phoebe hadn't talked much about her romantic life,
about boyfriends, or even if she had one. It seemed unusual for a girl
her age not to even mention that aspect of her life. Marcia knew well
enough not to press for details and none had been forthcoming. But for
some reason, on that particular morning, Phoebe was inclined to open up.
Marcia listened, mostly silent, letting Phoebe proceed at her own pace.
What she said shouldn't have been a surprise.
She'd had boyfriends, most of them nice, almost all of whom seemed to
fall madly in love with her.
"I don't know what's the matter with me though," Phoebe said, frowning.
"I like them well enough at the beginning, but the minute some boy admits
he loves me, I sort of lose interest."
Marcia stirred vanilla into the batter in the bowl, and nodded. "Well."
"It's like I love the attention and all. Just not the rest of it." Phoebe
laughed in a self-deprecating way. "You know, the loving him back part."
"It's definitely nice to have the attention, but that doesn't mean you
have to love the person back. You don't have to love just any old person
who loves you. You're not under any obligation."
Marcia was thinking to her own early days with Claire, how Claire, being
older and more experienced, had pursued her. How Marcia was sure, even
then, that she didn't love Claire, but that it had felt so good to be
loved that she convinced herself that the gratitude she felt was the same
as love. But it wasn't the same. She loved the being-loved, not Claire.
"I feel that way about mom sometimes, too."
Marcia stopped stirring a moment, looking up, wondering if Phoebe had
somehow caught her train of thought. But no, Phoebe was staring down at
the counter, absorbed in her own reflections.
"It's like mom has this image of me and it's all based on what she
expects a daughter should be. She has a whole image of life, you know,
and sometimes I just don't feel that I'm the person that fits into it.
She wants me to be like this doll that she dresses up and moves around in
her dollhouse world, acting the way she wants me to act, talking the way
she wants me to talk. I suppose that's something like the way you felt?"
Marcia knew they were on sensitive territory here, bordering an area that
was probably not appropriate for Phoebe to visit, not with Marcia as her
guide. Or was it? Maybe her daughter needed to know that she wasn't
alone, that she didn't have to feel guilty or crazy or ungrateful for
feeling the way she did, for insisting on her own life.
"Sort of, yes."
"I feel that I don't even really know who I am. That I'm just starting to
figure it out and mom tries to drag me back to the way she wants me to be
every time I say or do something not according to the master plan."
"She means well," Marcia felt compelled to say in Claire's defense.
Because it was true, Claire did mean well. "She just...well, sometimes
she takes it for granted that there is only the one best way to live and
the one best world to live in and it's the one she believes in. She has
trouble understanding that it just isn't for everyone."
"You know, the truth is that I do understand why you left. Before I
didn't. Or I didn't want to admit it to myself. I was just too angry.
See, mom has this ideal of me that just isn't true. She wants me to be
this thin, popular girl with lots of boyfriends. And that just isn't me.
And it will never be me. So I can't help but disappoint her in the long
run."
"Like I did."
Phoebe nodded, tears flowing down her cheeks, her shoulders shaking.
Marcia stopped stirring, laid the spoon aside. She reached over the
counter and laid a hand on Phoebe's quaking shoulder, staying on her side
of the breakfast island, sensing that her daughter still needed a barrier
of separation. It was the only way for her to find herself.
"What is it Phoebe?"
"I don't know. Sometimes I wonder."
"Wonder what?"
"If I'll ever find anyone I really love."
"Of course you will, honey. You're still way young. Anyone you loves now,
honestly, probably wouldn't be the one you'll love forever and ever
anyway."
Phoebe looked up, her eyes shining with tears, perhaps, but shining.
"Really?"
"Really."
"Thing of it is, though, I'm not even sure I'm...well that I'm..."
Marcia had a sudden intuition of what Phoebe was trying to say but she
gave the girl a chance to say it in her own way, to finish in her own
time. She was having trouble finding the way, but it seemed important
that she do so.
"I'm not even sure that I like...boys."
"It's okay," Marcia said.
Phoebe shrugged. "I know it's okay. But I don't think it would be okay
with mom. Oh she's for gay rights and all that. She's worked on AIDS
prevention programs and volunteered at the clinic and she signs petitions
right and left for gay marriage and all that stuff. She's very
politically correct, you know. She's for all the right, cool, good
causes. Being gay is okay. Just not for her daughter. Just not in her
dollhouse world."
Yes, Marcia thought, that just about summed it up. The irony of Claire's
hostile reaction to Marcia's revelation and transition seemed lost on
Claire herself. Somehow it was different when it was personal. Of course,
Claire had plenty of reason to feel betrayed and wronged and devastated
learning that she'd married a transsexual. But couldn't there be at least
a little room for understanding? Couldn't they come to agree that it was
really no one's "fault?"
Phoebe sighed, as if the answers to their questions, both spoken and
unspoken, were, in the end, unanswerable.
"How does anyone know what they really want? Who they really are? It took
you so long. No offense intended, but I don't want to make the same
mistake that you did."
Marcia laughed. "Not to worry. You're already far ahead of the game on
that score."
She wasn't quite sure how to ask the next question, or even if she should
ask, but went straight ahead and asked it anyway, in the most
straightforward way she could, since Phoebe seemed to be in the mood for
straight talk.
"Have you ever been with a girl?"
Phoebe shrugged. "Now and then. It's all been pretty soft-core up to now,
pretty ambiguous, I guess you could say. Sort of...just laying around.
Lesbo-lite." Phoebe laughed, self-deprecatingly. "Nothing serious." But
she looked up from the counter with a serious expression and fixed Marcia
with tear-bright eyes. "So how did you finally figure it out? That you
were...you know, trans?"
"It's kind of a long story. A real long story. There was no one thing, no
big reveal," Marcia sighed, trying to put the answer into words. "I
guess, to boil it down, you'll know when you meet the person who accepts
you exactly as you are. When you're with that person, every part of you
feels engaged and alive, every part of you feels like it's moving in the
same direction. But the trick of it is...you'll never find that person
until you stop trying to find them, until you stop trying to appeal to
this or that person, to whoever you think you should be trying to appeal
to."
Marcia stopped for a moment. Was what she was saying answering Phoebe's
question? Was it even making sense? She glanced at her daughter, who, for
once, seemed to be hanging on every word Marcia said. She decided to
continue.
"Be yourself, feel good about yourself, and the person who's supposed to
love you will find you. But they can't find you if you hide yourself
behind some mask. You'll only attract the wrong people and you'll wonder
why you don't love them. And why they don't really love you. You'll
always be afraid that they'll see behind the mask and stop loving you.
And it's true. Some day they will. Be yourself, Phoebe, it's not just
good enough, it's wonderful. Do what makes you feel more like yourself
and you'll like yourself more. Do that and you'll figure it out."
"I'm just afraid if I really let myself be myself I'll end up all alone."
"I thought that too. But it's okay to be alone if you like yourself. It's
hard to imagine, but it's true. You'll be your own best company. Besides,
love is a lot like lightning. More often than not it strikes the one
figure standing alone in the field."
"Is that how Walt found you?"
"Yes. Like lightning. When I became myself, he appeared from out of
nowhere."
"You should marry him."
Marcia just laughed.
"I'm not kidding. You should."
Marcia glanced at Walt behind the wheel of the pick-up. She reached
behind her sunglasses with a fingertip and dabbed at a tear forming in
the corner of her eye. The sky was threatening rain again. A sign along
the road informed them that the airport exits would be coming up in the
next ten miles. They traveled on in a companionable silence, each of them
absorbed in their own thoughts.
At some point, Walt had turned on the radio, setting it to one of the
several soft jazz stations offered by the satellite service to which he
subscribed. Now he reached up to turn on the GPS device, interrupting the
radio broadcast. Because the final approach to the airport was always a
bit tricky.
After a third "last" embrace, Marcia gave Phoebe up to airport security.
The airport wasn't crowded for once and the lines of resigned-looking
passengers clutching their shoes seemed to be moving at a fairly steady
pace. Phoebe looked achingly young as she stood waiting her turn to pass
through the metal detector. Ironically, she seemed a less self-assured
and more fragile version of the tough-acting cynical girl who'd called
out to Marcia on the sidewalk upon arriving in Hope Crossing only a few
weeks before.
Later, on the drive home, Marcia was unable to shake that last
bittersweet image of her daughter. She'd had so little time in the end.
But isn't that how it always is, no matter how much time we have? The
more important question to ask oneself is, had she made the most of the
time she had? Had she been able to effect a positive change in Phoebe's
life? Marcia couldn't help but wonder if she'd said and done the right
things. If she'd managed to help Phoebe at all.
"Do you think she'll make it in rehab this time?" she asked Walt. She was
talking about all of them, though, because, in a sense, they were all in
rehab of one kind or another when you came to think about it.
"Fall seven times get up eight," Walt said. He, too, meant all of them.
And he was right. If you fell down, all you could do was to stand up
again. But sometimes that made life seem a bit like a sad comedy. Like
one of those silent movies where a man keeps slipping on the same banana
peel over and over again. You feel guilty about laughing but you do all
the same. Maybe because it really did sum up the tragicomedy of life in a
nutshell.
"It all seems so futile sometimes. Like you try and try and can't get it
right. You can never stay on your feet. Or not for long, anyway."
Walt nodded. "I used to see it something like that, too. But, in the end,
I think the victory really comes in the getting up, not in the staying on
your feet. In the very moment you try again. Stop the film right there.
That's where you win."
Marcia thought it over for a mile or two. It reminded her of what Grace
had said about everyone starting out as a first draft. Imperfect. Needing
correction. Rewriting themselves. No one was finished; there was always
room for improvement, and so long as you could admit that, so long as you
had breath in your lungs and the pencil in your hand, you were still in
the game.
You could revise yourself, that was the beauty of it. Not by being harsh
or self-judgmental either, which only led to despair and self-hate, which
led to things like eating disorders and substance abuse and--she felt a
phantom itching on the insides of her wrists where the indelible scars,
like the signature on a contract with the devil, would forever remain to
remind her--suicide. There was another way. You could revise yourself with
kindness and love, patience and understanding. And, most of all, with
the imagination to see what you might still become, in spite of the odds,
if only you dared.
And that's what they were all doing now, wasn't it?
Phoebe going back to rehab, but also Walt and Marcia, even Claire, to the
extent that she was able, they were all revising themselves. It was a new
chapter in all their lives, a time for corrections, a time to write a new
draft. And Marcia, whatever her part in the bigger story, was determined
to make this next draft the best one yet.
* * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
Marisol
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